I never called corn sweet until I moved to the Midwest.
In California, corn was just corn, something you ate with too much butter. But for four years now I’ve lived among farmers’ sons and for farmers’ sons, there isn’t just corn, but sweet white and sweet yellow and sweet multi—because here in the Midwest there’s also feed and seed and ethanol corn, a lot of it, and no one in his right mind would call that kind of corn sweet, whatever its color.
Seed corn. Feed corn. You say it with a kind of grimace. Cows eat it before we eat them. Yet the vast sweep of unsweet corn fields—bearded, detasselled, green, yellow, harvested, whatever—flat as a crisp new map stretched over a table, straight down to the geometrically flawless line of the Midwest horizon, is stunning. Continue reading
